Olympique Lyonnais's Norwegian player Ada Hegerberg became the first woman to win the Ballon d'Or on Monday night, but her moment was marred by a strange query from the co-host of the award ceremony. “Do you know how to twerk?” DJ Martin Solveig asked Hegerberg who came on stage to receive the award.
“You've seen that I prepared a little celebration for Kylian (Mbappe) so we said we're going to do something similar. Do you know how to twerk?” An embarrassed Hegerberg responded with a “no”.
Solveig received a lot of flak on social media for asking Hegerberg if she could perform the sexually suggestive dance. This is the first time a woman has been presented the Ballon d'Or in the history of the awards since 1956 when the first the prestigious awards Following the massive outrage, he acknowledged and apologised for his comments. In a video he posted on Twitter, Solveig said that he was astonished at the reactions on social media and added that he did not mean to offend anyone.
Sincere apologies to the one I may have offended. My point was : I don’t invite women to twerk but dance on a Sinatra song. Watch the full sequence People who have followed me for 20 years know how respectful I am especially with women pic.twitter.com/pnZX8qvl4R
— Martin Solveig (@martinsolveig) December 3, 2018
“Of course, I didn't want to offend anyone, this comes from a distortion of English level and my English culture level which is obviously not (high) enough. Because I didn't meant to offend anyone and I didn't know that this could be seen as such an offence especially if you consider the sequence in total when we ended up dancing (to) Frank Sinatra, Ada and myself.”
“This was a joke probably a bad one, I want to apologise to the one I offended, sorry about that.”
Solveig also tweeted that he spoke to Hegerberg explaining that it was a joke that was not meant to offend.
Hegerberg, who led Lyon win the Women's Champions League last season and won a 12 consecutive French title, played down the incident and said that she didn't consider it sexual harassment. “He came to me afterwards and was really sad that it went that way. I didn't really think about it at the time to be honest. I didn't really consider it a sexual harassment or anything in the moment,” she told the BBC.
Hegerberg spoke of her pride in winning the award and said she hoped it would motivate young female players.
Croatia's Luka Modric won the Ballon d'Or for the best male player after leading the national side to the final of the 2018 World Cup and winning the Champions League.
